A baby is always considered a “bundle of joy,” as they say, but naturally, a child is a lot of work to raise. New parents will find their schedules and energy levels altered quite a bit when they have a baby in the household, and they will soon teach their baby to eat, look the parents in the eyes, and other behaviors. Toddlers may be toilet-trained, and toddlers may graduate from a crib to a child-sized bed. Meanwhile, even sleep is something that may require some training. Not that a baby has to be taught to sleep in the first place; babies spend most of their time asleep, and toddlers may get between 12 and 24 hours of sleep in a 24 hour period. The issue is that a baby or toddler’s sleep habits might be highly inconvenient for the parents and disrupt their own schedule, but training your baby to sleep is totally possible. A baby sleep coach or baby sleep trainer may be hired for this very reason, and parents may enjoy relief from their baby’s disruptive sleep schedule when a baby sleep trainer is on hand. To train your baby to sleep on a new schedule, some help may be hired.
Babies and Sleep
What exactly is the problem here? It’s silly to resent your baby or toddler or blame them for needing sleep and waking up, but then again, a baby’s sleep schedule has its own needs in mind rather than the parents’. Children and adults like sleep for seven to nine hours in a row at night, and the key here is that these people sleep for that time without waking up again. This is important for a person’s REM cycles, and failing to get into a sufficiently deep sleep can cause sleep deprivation.
Meanwhile, a baby’ sleep schedule looks very different. While babies sleep for many hours per day, they won’t get all of those hours in a row. Rather, babies will often wake back up, often after just two to four hours of sleep, since they need a diaper change or feeding. Babies may need to eat (formula, baby food, and their mother’s milk) much more than a child or adult will eat, and they have more frequent defecation needs, too. This leads to a familiar paradigm of parents being frequently awoken at night by their baby crying out for their attention. A parent’s mind is naturally attuned to hear their child’s cries (especially the mother), so parents may not like these constant disruptions. A baby cannot be simply instructed to sleep differently, though, so a baby sleep trainer may be hired. This may be especially helpful if the parents aren’t sure how to sleep-train their baby or toddler on their own. What might a baby sleep trainer do for their clients?
Hiring a Baby Sleep Trainer
A number of agencies across the United States offer the services of baby sleep trainers, and they are often named after this to make them easy for clients to recognize and approach. It may be noted that these agencies are not federally regulated, so parents may want to carefully evaluate them on their own to ensure that they are hiring trustworthy professionals. When the parents contact an agency like this, the agency will send a trainer to their client’s residence and meet them, and interview them and ask the parents to fill out questionnaires so that the trainer knows what sort of household they are working with. If the baby has serious sleep health issues, a doctor should be consulted, but otherwise, the trainer may (for a fee) start training that toddler or baby to have a more consistent and parent-friendly schedule for both eating and sleeping.
The baby’s nap schedule, feeding schedule, and more will be adjusted smoothly and carefully so that the baby or toddler can keep pace, and get used to the new paradigm. It may take a week or so for a baby to get used to the new schedule, and once a baby weighs 14 or more pounds, it may be able to sleep the whole night on just one feeding. Toddlers may need longer to fully train like this, but it can be done.
